musicals
joe.muggs
Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show. At the beginning, it does suggest you’re going to get some high drama: the rather Leonard Cohen-ish “A Chef’s Kiss” would certainly fit in a middle of a musical in the “how did I get here, where will I go?” bit where the protagonist is alone in the spotlight on a blank stage. But where you might expect such a number to pick up Read more ...
Tom Baily
What did Sia want to achieve with Music, her deeply confused first stumble into filmmaking? The reclusive Australian has enjoyed years of global fame for a successful music career. Was it never enough?Music is about an autistic girl called Music (Maddie Ziegler) who lives a controlled life with her grandmother. When her grandmother (and only carer) dies suddenly, she comes under the care of her wild half-sister Zu (Kate Hudson). Zu is a free spirit who is recovering from a damaged past. A chance to find meaning seems to have arrived in this new role as protector-sibling, but she doesn’t Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s difficult to know where to start with Sia’s Music. The album is billed as a collection of songs “from and inspired by” the film of the same name – so not a soundtrack, except for when it is. It tracks range from candy coated to overly earnest; liberated to sexless; pop fun to cinematic; oblique storytelling to big-name co-writes – and yet, as delivered in the Australian singer’s distinctive, powerful voice, have a tendency to blur into one.The album starts strongly with “Together”. Co-written with star producer Jack Antonoff, it’s a huge pop number that taps into both artists’ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The twelve days of Christmas have nothing on the flotilla of Christmas Carols jostling for view this season, each of which is substantially different enough from the next so as to give Dickens's 1843 story its prismatic due. Hailing from Broadway, where it was a seasonal perennial for a decade, this adaptation from Disney regular Alan Menken, Ragtime lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and the late, much-missed Mike Ockrent puts the emphasis squarely on the big and the brash. If you want quiet moments of revelation, Shaun Kerrison's musical staged concert is not for you. On the other hand, I all Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going, here it’s hand sanitiser fluid, before you’re led – hopefully wearing a suitably decadent facemask – to a socially-distanced place in the speakeasy where the action will unfold. In a bold opening, the script swoops straight from the novel’s beginning to its end, so that the narrator, Nick Carraway, flags up Gatsby’s death before we meet him Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Originally due to premiere back in March, Sleepless – a musical version of the winning 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle – now acts as a test case for the return of fully staged but socially distanced indoor theatre, AKA Stage 4 of the Government’s “roadmap”. Though a musical adaptation premiered in the States in 2013, this is billed as a new work, with a fresh book by Michael Burdette and score by Brits Robert Scott and Brendan Cull. Bravo to all involved for bringing audiences back safely and enthusiastically, even if the show itself, contrary to its title, is a tad more somnolent than might Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On a normal bank holiday weekend there would be festival events held in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. But in this anything-but-normal year, choreographer and director Andrew Wright instead gathered together a group of people who live in or who have an association with Somerset to donate their talents for free to put on a musical fundraiser. Local artistic bigwigs Michael Eavis and Sir Cameron Mackintosh gave their backing, the latter with permissions for songs from his productions, and the former with something more prosaic – as MC Jane Milligan said: “Thanks for the bins.”There was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of rain and untold bliss: those were the takeaways from Saturday night’s alfresco Opera Holland Park concert performance of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s eternally glorious 1973 musical, A Little Night Music. I doubt any of the 200 or so people in attendance will soon forget that night's music, and not only because those who stayed the course are very likely still drying out from a belligerently sustained summer squall that mattered little set against the immediacy and necessity of art. Among the 90-year-old composer's most popular titles, and showcasing his best-known Read more ...
Matt Wolf
After months spent sifting amongst the virtual, I'm pleased to report that live performance looks to be on the (socially distanced) rebound. The week ahead sees the start of a six-week run at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park of the alfresco venue's seismically exciting revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, this time performed in concert with multiple casts due to the vocal demands of the score. And the ever-wistful and beautiful A Little Night Music finds the onetime Olivier Award winners from Carousel (a lifetime ago, and yet the memory is entirely immediate) pairing up once again: Janie Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
In a purgatorial summer, this boisterous, camp and chaotically charming musical is a tonic. It’s a winning combination of slick and slapdash, performed before a masked, socially distanced audience in a hastily repurposed beer garden behind the Eagle pub in Vauxhall.Aptly, its fascinating, fact-based story is one of triumph over adversity. Fanny and Stella were two comely Victorian ladies with a penchant for theatricals, who led double lives. Beneath their paint and petticoats, they were Frederick William Park and Thomas Ernest Boulton, cross-dressing young gay men from well-to-do families, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
After a weeklong hiatus due to an absence of noteworthy material, this column is back heralding the return, as well, of something resembling live theatre. Okay, so the Simon Stephens premiere Blindness at the Donmar doesn't actually feature actors in the flesh, and we've had word just last yesterday that illness has delayed Andrew Scott's live-stream performance from the Old Vic. But there's still Fanny and Stella alfresco in a south London beer garden to welcome playgoers back into the fold, whilst online offerings range from a near-ubiquitous Miriam Margolyes in a 20-minute premiere to the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995 abstract musical features various characters responding to a moment that upends their lives. Formally, it’s another Brown show that suits our current circumstances, since the songs are mainly standalone solos, and the performers’ various homes work fine as background; no need for a helicopter or falling chandelier in this one.The central idea also speaks Read more ...